Dear Facebook Friend,

I hate to have to tell you this, but the real world misses me. I want to still be friends but I cannot see you as often. It’s not me, it’s you. It is definitively you. You suck as a friend. I never see you at my kitchen table. I never hear your calls. When I am around you, I feel less than, as you seem so together all the time. So perfect, so glossy, when my own life is filled with challenges and doubt.

Hello Facebook Friend,

The Book of Faces is not your friend. It is a machine quietly designed to creep into every facet of your mind until you cannot think of anything else. You forget your friends and family. You are late to your date. You are distracted over dinner. Your nervous system is primed to respond to alerts and notes. You are designing posts and pictures in your mind.

One of the biggest mars on the face of kinship was smote by the Book of Faces when they took our precious word “Friend” and used it in their cage of dreams to destroy people’s sense of personal boundaries. You share things with total strangers that you would not mention over tea. Your real world friends think they know how you are, based on the words that flit from your post to their page, so they never call. They are comforted by a cartoon of your multidimensional being. All is lost under the page, the presence of one warm body relating to another warm body, the psychic queues, the quick glance, the nervous tick. We are all cartoons, my Facebook Friend.

The technology used to create this machine, the cage of dreams, is a set of tools with unlimited power. It can connect people across the globe, fuel artistic spirits, form social movements, influence governments. However, the way it is organized, it is meant to confuse and mistake our minds to think that we can source from virtual reality things that can only truly be found in realtime. The game is lure and enchant, keep you wasted, keep you awake in the virtual reality until your face goes pale from lack of sunlight. They would wrap you permanently in their spells if they could. The only reason they are not able to lock the cage is the frustrating truth of our free will.

And free will we must use. Some of us are capable of moderation. We beat the machine by diving in, getting what want, planting seeds, putting down trails for other to follow and then getting right back out. Only the strongest of heart can do it regularly and come out unscathed. Countless others are drowning in the sea of thought-forms and suggestions.

We cannot forget who’s the boss of our minds. In order to regain sovereignty of ourselves, we have to step back. We have to be able to turn it off and turn it on as our tool. It is a technique to slow the rush or stop it for as long as we want to. Our lives are here, where we sit, with who or what is physically around us. We must return to clear mind, focus on one thing at a time, make decisions on what we think, how we think, change things in our lives that we don’t like. For if we do not, the world will not change. Facebook isn’t going to do it. The Koch Brothers aren’t going to do it. Ecosystems are being eradicated, populations executed over oil wars and our power to stop it is based solely on our ability to regain control of our capacities and our free time. This power struggle does not require money or guns to win, merely strength of mind.

If we do not clear our minds, culture will die. True genius is reliant on mental quiet, a stillness that allows the passions to sprout through with new creations. And we, the community, the people sitting across from you on the metro poring over our Facebook Pages, need that. The world has had enough imitations of imitations. Indulgent screentime of any sort is dangerous without a constant grounding in the realtime reality. You know this, you say, but to say it, know it and not do anything about it is the same as an alcoholic who says he is in perfect control as she hails over the bartender.

Please, my Facebook Friend, come out into the light of your own world and help me to do the same. It is better to struggle on a playing field where we can form our lives into ways that delight us than to languish in a reality where the rules are changing unexpectedly by people whom we will never meet. We can find nourishment in realtime and source what the world needs.

We must never be deluded into thinking that the Place of Faces is a benevolent one. It is a major corporation striving for profit. The Book of Faces may be a virtual experience but it has brick and mortar buildings, over 20,000 employees and is worth over 59 billion dollars. The popups that annoy you, the behavior of an access(friend) connection, the rules you are allowed to use as a group administrator, all of this was configured by some millennial sitting in a cube somewhere in California.

The structure of the cage of dreams is pre-designed, limiting and focusing the pathways of how you may communicate in their world, suggestive of confusing, false intimacy. Agenda decides which factors determine what content lands on your Wall, what information floods into your precious, precious mind every time you jump in to play. They intend to make you want to stay. Like a bad friend that knows that you are tired and need to go spend time with your kids before they go to bed, they hand you another glass of wine, night after night, until those kids start to wilt from the lack of your sun shining into their delicate, malleable hearts. Replace kids with creative endeavor, loved ones, self.

And our missteps, our disclosures to people we don’t know, our private chats, the flame wars and the rants, they are all quietly recorded by the state, easily searchable by some other millennial in a cube somewhere behind the walls of the NSA. No boundaries at all.

Post navigation

4 thoughts on “Dear Facebook Friend,”

THank you for writing this, Tasara. I feel this very strongly. It’s been hovering on the edges of my mind to disconnect from fb altogether…and yet I get sucked in again.
Thank you and may I share this?…on fb!!!?

You are very welcome! I write it for myself as well. I think that most of us know when we’re in too deep and we might even know why but until we take the time to spell it out for ourselves and look at the mechanisms, we do not have the power to withdraw that we really need to return to ourselves fully.